EditShare, the company behind Academy and Emmy award-winning video editing software Lightworks announced plans to release its product under an open source license. Lightworks was most recently used to edit movies like Shutter Island and Centurion, but is also credited with helping create otehr films like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Mission Impossible.

Lightworks Open Source is packed with a ton of features including 3D editorial functionality, native RED editing, native 2K support with DPX and RED, and Universal Media File support. It can also share media and work in tandem with other editing software such as Final Cut Pro and Avid.

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Lightworks is some old-school heavy-duty crazy stuff - last time I even heard the name was 2004 - with its own line of editing decks and rack systems, but it looks like EditShare is doing a pretty thorough reworking for the OSS release. Back then it was purely for cutting video and designed to be paired with Avid, After Effects, or other post-production platforms.

It looks quite advanced and the motivation seems to be to sell more of their peripherals and storage/collaboration systems, but the feature set is very interesting - broad format support, collaboration features, plugin support. No release platforms have been announced; previous versions as of 2008 ran on Windows XP, required 2GHz CPU/2GB RAM/128MB video card, and cost between $3,800 and $9,500. You can view an old copy of the Softworks user's guide - I'm assuming Softworks is the foundation of this release.

Between this news and the release of OpenShot 1.0, it's shaping up to be a banner year for open-source NLE.

You can sign up to be notified when it's available to download. The open-source version expected to be available by 3Q this year.

In a newsletter that went out today, they confirmed that Lightworks currently works on Windows 7 and Windows XP, but they hope to extend it to other systems after open sourcing it. They hope to release this source code before the end of the year, but before that, they plan to offer a free download of the software during the 3rd quarter of this year.

I got selected as one of about 80 beta testers.Unfortunately, I have to sign an NDA, so I can't talk about any of the details of the software.But, I plan to try to make an AMV on this thing, so we'll see how that goes

I just wanna say this. Don't get your hopes up too much for this.I doubt anyone here will be choosing this software.

I think the overall goal/purpose of this software is perhaps much different than what an AMV editor would expect.It's still in development so maybe some things will change and it will become much better.But right now, I think I could cut together an amv more easily in avisynth.